He said nothing.  But he read and re-read the bulletins I had, and sent for more, which came to him promptly.  They didn’t know him, at the Bureau; they asked him no questions; he wasn’t going to pay anybody so much as a penny.  They assumed that the man who asked for advice and information was entitled to all they could reasonably give him, and they gave it as a matter of course.  That is how and why he found himself in touch with his Uncle Sam, a source hitherto disliked and distrusted.  This source was glad to put its trained intelligence at his service and the only reward it looked to was his increased capacity to succeed in his work!  He simply couldn’t dislike or distrust that which benefited him; and as his admiration and respect for the Department of Agriculture grew, unconsciously his respect and admiration for the great government behind it grew likewise.  After all, it was his government which was reaching across intervening miles, conveying information, giving expert instruction, telling him things he wanted to know and encouraging him to go right on and find out more for himself!

Now if he had asked himself what his government could do for him, he had to answer:  “It can help me to make good.”

And he began to understand that this was possible because he obeyed the law, and that only in intelligent obedience and co-operation is there any true freedom.  The law no longer meant skulking by day and terror by night; it was protection and peace, and a chance to work in the open, and the sympathy and understanding and comradeship of decent folks.  The government was no longer a brute force which arbitrarily popped men into prison; it was the common will of a free people, just as the law was the common conscience.

I dare not say that he learned all this easily, or all at once, or even willingly.  None of us learns our great lessons easily.  We have to live them, breathe them, work them out with sweat and tears.  That we do learn them, even inadequately, makes the glory and the wonder of man.

And so John Flint went to school to the government of the United States, and carried its little text-books about with him and taught them to others in even more need that he; and heckled hopeless boys into Corn Clubs; and coaxed sullen mothers and dissatisfied girls into Poultry and Tomato Clubs; and was full of homely advice upon such living subjects as the spraying of fruit trees, and how to save them from blight and scale-insects, and how to get rid of flies, and cut-worms, and to fight the cattle-tick, which is our curse; and the preservation of birds, concerning which he was rabid.  His liking for birds began with Miss Sally Ruth’s pigeons and the friendly birds in our garden.  And as he learned to know them his love for them grew.  I have seen him daily visit a wren’s nest without once alarming the little black-eyed mother.  I have heard him give the red-bird’s call, and heard that loveliest of all birds answer him.  And I have seen the impudent jays, within reach of his hand, swear at him unabashed and unafraid, because he fed a vireo first.